John At The Center

Title aside, Planty is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it.

They are not a broker, this is just a tool. If you have a broker, you can put their fees in the tool to add those into the system as well. The whole idea is to put a plan in place — it’s not about rushing to invest.

via “Plantly Is An Investment Tool That Aims Not To Suck”.

many economists are beginning to question whether the European Central Bank’s obsession with inflation makes sense right now. Indeed, some of these experts say that deflation could be the bigger threat to Europe.

via As Deflation Looms, E.C.B. Keeps Its Eye Firmly on Inflation – NYTimes.com.

Don’t get me wrong…I’m glad people are adopting technical analysis in droves, as I believe price action is more honest than most CEOs.  At 3500 or so, MTA membership is still dwarfed by the fundamentalists at CFA.  But I can’t help thinking that the attraction to moving averages and support/resistance lines is partly responsible for the manic behavior of stock prices.

via We’re All Technicians Now « Derek Hernquist.

As the authors observed the Endowment’s gradual transition from a conventional public markets strategy to one capitalizing on alternative investments—notably private equity, real assets, and hedge funds—it became apparent that much of the putative case for the Endowment’s performance, the skill of its active managers, was not entirely correct.

via Yale’s Endowment Returns: Manager Skill or Risk Exposure? – World Beta – Engineering Targeted Returns and Risk.

This table shows that 47% of consumption growth since December comes from spending on import-intensive goods.  In particular,  the two biggest increases in spending came for ‘clothing and footwear’ and ‘consumer electronics and IT equipment’, two categories dominated by imported goods.  You can be sure that when Americans step up their spending on clothing, they are creating very few manufacturing jobs in this country.

via No, It’s Not 70% of Economic Activity « Mandel on Innovation and Growth.

But for the foreseeable future, investors will be hard-pressed to ignore board-selected agency ratings and rely instead on the traditional ratings. That board-selected agencies will often be relative unknowns may be a benefit. Without a well-worn path to justifying an investment decision, investors may indeed feel more pressure to “do their own homework.”

via Another View: Reining In the Rating Agencies – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com.

At this point I'm not picky about how the incentive to issue higher than justified ratings is removed, there's more than one way to do this, the main thing is that a strong and effective mechanism along these lines is included in the final bill. [There also needs to be an entry and exit mechanism so that firm's that consistently give misleading risk assessments are driven from the set of authorized ratings agencies and replaced by new entrants to the industry.]

via Economist’s View: “Rating the Raters”.

Christmas, and have been on-going since.

Sample ping latency across several hundred EC2 instances

via cloudkick | blog: Visual evidence of Amazon EC2 network issues.

China is investing in small Australian mining companies, creating a class of superrich entrepreneurs.

via Bloomberg.com: Bloomberg Markets Magazine.

Jeffery says that most treasuries with dozens of bank relationships in multiple countries can see the values of only 60 percent or 70 percent of their positions at any given time. Google's systems can monitor 98 percent of its holdings in real time, says Callinicos. “One of the toughest parts of [managing cash] is extracting the right data for the right decisions at the push of a button,” says Wolfgang J. Koester, CEO of FiREapps, a maker of financial software. Callinicos “has been an industry leader on this.”

via Google’s Latest Launch: Its Own Trading Floor – BusinessWeek.